The Temptation of St. Anthony
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
"[Demons] taking the forms of women, wild beasts, creeping things."--Life of Antony "Several painters have handled a subject of this kind, with a view of assembling as many horrid phantoms as their imagination could suggest; but all the designs I have chanced to meet of the temptation of St. Anthony were rather a sort of odd, wild grotesques, than anything capable of producing a serious passion. In all these subjects poetry is very happy. Its apparitions, its chimeras, its harpies, its allegorical figures, are grand and affecting; and though Virgil’s Fame and Homer’s Discord are obscure, they are magnificent figures. These figures in painting would be clear enough, but I fear they might become ridiculous." --A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) by Edmund Burke |
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The Temptation of St. Anthony is an episode in the life of the Christian monk Anthony the Great.
The Temptation of St. Anthony may also refer to:
Visual arts
- Temptation of Saint Anthony in visual arts, including a list of works with the title
Other arts
- The Temptation of Saint Anthony (novel), an 1874 novel by Gustave Flaubert
- The Temptation of Saint Anthony (film), an 1898 silent film
- The Temptation of Saint Anthony (opera), a 2003 opera by Bernice Johnson Reagon
- "The Temptation of St. Anthony", a movement of Symphony: Mathis der Maler by Paul Hindemith
See also